System and method for determining a subset of transactions of a computing system for use in determining resource costs

Abstract

A method comprises receiving a representative workload of a computing system, where the representative workload comprises a plurality of composite transactions. In certain embodiments, the representative workload is a historical workload of a computing system. In general, a composite transaction refers to a transaction that comprises a plurality of embedded transactions. The method further comprises determining a subset of the plurality of composite transactions for which a corresponding resource cost is to be determined; and determining, based at least in part on a statistical regression-based analysis, a resource cost for the composite transaction(s) in the determined subset, where the resource cost reflects an amount of utilization of at least one resource of the computing system in serving the composite transaction(s).

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is related to concurrently filed and commonly assigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11 / 684,563 entitled “REGRESSION-BASED SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING RESOURCE COSTS FOR COMPOSITE TRANSACTIONS”, and concurrently filed and commonly assigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11 / 684,569 entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR CAPACITY PLANNING FOR COMPUTING SYSTEMS”, the disclosures of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference.TECHNICAL FIELD[0002]The following description relates generally to capacity planning for computer systems, and more particularly to systems and methods for determining a subset of composite transactions included an a representative workload of a computing system for use in determining resource costs of the computing system for serving such composite transactions.DESCRIPTION OF RELATED ART[0003]Today, computer systems are delivering (e.g., via computer networks, such as the Internet) a large ar...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The patent text describes a system and method for determining the cost of serving composite transactions in computer systems. The technical effect of the patent is to provide a more accurate way of determining the resource costs of a computer system by using a regression-based system for determining the cost of individual transactions. This approach takes into account the actual workload of the system, rather than just using a typical workload to estimate the cost. The system uses a combination of application servers and database technology to manage the demands of clients accessing the system. The method can be used in enterprise development projects to ensure efficient and effective capacity planning.

Problems solved by technology

As information technology (“IT”) and application infrastructures, such as those employed by the above-mentioned service providers for serving their clients, have become more complex, predicting and controlling the issues surrounding system performance and capacity planning have become a difficult (and sometimes overwhelming) task to many organizations.

For larger IT projects, it is not uncommon for the cost factors related to performance tuning, performance management, and capacity planning to result in the largest and least controlled expense.

Application performance issues have an immediate impact on customer satisfaction.

A sudden slowdown of an enterprise-wide application can affect a large population of customers, can lead to delayed projects, and ultimately can result in company financial loss.

In such multi-tiered systems, frequent calls to application servers and data storage (e.g., databases) may place a heavy load on these resources and may cause throughput bottlenecks and high server-wide processing latency.

While this performance evaluation approach can be useful at the initial stages of design and development of a future system, it is often inadequate for answering more specific questions about an existing system that is deployed in a service provider's environment.

In many cases, the workload actually encountered by a deployed system does not correspond with the synthetic workload that was expected for the system, and thus the preliminary system capacity estimates may be inadequate.

Further, the techniques used for arriving at the preliminary system capacity estimates are unable to answer specific capacity planning questions that a given service provider may have about the capacity of the deployed system.

Further still, evaluating the capacity of a deployed system based on a representative workload of the deployed system, such as an actual historical workload encountered by the deployed system, may be difficult and / or compute-intensive, particularly when the representative workload includes composite transactions.

Determining a resource cost associated with serving such composite transactions may be desired for evaluating capacity of a computing system, but techniques for so determining such resource costs, particularly in a manner that is not compute prohibitive, are lacking in traditional capacity planning systems.

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